A cancer study has achieved a breakthrough by showing that sick cells may be able to split themselves up to recover, instead of dying, when the body is exposed to chemotherapy – all by disabling a process that communicates the news of death.

The University of Colorado Cancer Center study, published in the journal Cell Reports, talks
of a process called autophagy, wherein cells devour parts of
themselves when faced with some external stressor. But while
autophagy is not a new concept, its study has not yet been
thorough enough for it not to amaze scientists with new
properties.

The term comes from the Greek expression “to eat
oneself” and described a process, wherein the little bits of
a cell, autophagosomes, trap dangerous or surplus material and
transport it elsewhere for the purpose of being recycled into
energy or immune protection, whenever the organism runs low.

But autophagy can be manipulated. The process could either be
fine-tuned enough, or the materials that work with it could also
be targeted. What the team found using the ovarian cancer model
is that “cancer cells may [still] be able to rescue
themselves from death caused by chemotherapies,” as the
deputy director of the CU Cancer Center, Andrew Thorburn, puts
it.

This is done by cheating the cell into thinking it’s not really
dead. In the moments of death, the mitochondrial cell walls are
stripped away and proteins are released – something called MOMP
by scientists.

MOMP is an indicator of death. Increased autophagy means the
autophagosomes are able to capture the released proteins and
revive a dead cell before it’s robbed of all its protein.

Thorburn explains that by inhibiting autophagy, “you’d make
this less likely to happen, i.e. when you kill cancer cells they
would stay dead.”

To prove this, the researchers focused on PUMA – a regulator of
cell death. By removing this regulator, they showed that high
autophagy can be used to create a special cell death, which kills
off bad material, but allows for the creation of a new cell in
its place with deposits of protein. In effect, the team are
regulating tumor growth itself by inducing high autophagy.

In future, they believe that by employing the newly discovered
“molecular mechanism whereby cell fate can be determined by
autophagy” and finding new targets in the cell to regulate,
they can create different inhibitor medicines for different types
of cancer.